One of the scenes in my head that made me want to keep this a Persona crossover.
"Oh, you're new," the brown-haired girl said with a delighted and delightful smile. "Where's Theodore?"
"Their son?" the white-haired musician asked her, looking up from the piano. "I believe they said he worked in another version of the Velvet Room, one open to far fewer of the Lilim." If that part of the angel Lilim's shared soul was even closed to most of itself, then no wonder Kaworu had never found himself there.
"Whose son?"
"Nameless and Belladonna," he told the Lilim, noting the brilliance of her soul fragment. "The musicians of the Velvet Room. He who plays the songs in Lilim hearts and she who sings the Aria of the Soul."
"Sounds like a nice change from elevator music." She frowned, leaning forward over the corner of the piano, leaning her elbows on it. "Red eyes? I thought all the Velvet Room attendants had yellow eyes."
"I'm only an intern," he said, although he was flattered. "Master Igor said that he was used to children who didn't know how to act like Lilim, and seeing all of humanity's different faces might help. At first I thought that donning the mask of the Persona Lilim would help, but I was told that on no account was I to listen to any voices in my head. Unless they were talking about social links."
She stared at him. "Wait, you… Lilim?!" she laughed. "I know that one. 'You should hit that,' and 'screw all the handsome boys!' that Lilim?"
He nodded. "While that certainly is a facet of humanity, I already knew enough to know she wasn't exactly representative of your kind. So you are a persona user?"
"Well, of course: I'm here, aren't I?" She had clearly noted the 'your kind,' but didn't see it as a big deal. Not here.
"You don't have to be a persona user to enter the Velvet Room – at least not this Velvet Room," he told her. "Someone was brought here by her friends in order to keep her safe for a few hours while they dealt with their enemy not long ago – at least not from my perspective." Time was strange here. According to Nameless, that was because humans all had their own individual perceptions of time, and something that seemed eternal to one could pass by in an instant for another.
"That's handy. My friends can't even see the door, and they're persona users. I end up staring into space looking like a ditz when I'm trying to do a complicated fusion." She grimaced.
"Then they must not have enough power to remember their names," he told her. "This place is part of the Sea of Unconsciousness, the soul shared by all the faces of the angel Lilim. Even though all humans share a single soul, you still have your individual identities. Someone who is unsure of their identity runs the risk of simply dissolving into the Sea, unable to determine for themselves what is and is not their own self." He looked at her curiously. "How is it that they have personas? A persona is a mask: is it not unsafe for them to don a mask over their spirit when they cannot remember their own faces? Isn't it dangerous for them to immerse themselves in another identity when they cannot envision their own?"
"All of my friends' personas are just their inner selves," she told him, blinking as though she'd realized something. "The mask they put on is their own face. The only time they get different personas is when they become different people. Huh. I never thought about it that way. I wonder if that explains Strega, why they're in danger from their own personas. Those personas were something forced on them, and if just wearing a mask is dangerous, since they might forget their real face… So their personas are inherently deadly to them. They can get overwhelmed by a self that isn't theirs."
"While all the gods and demons the Lilim have created are just faces of humanity. Even the other angels are themselves human," he said, picking out a few brief notes for no other reason than that music was a beautiful thing that healed the soul. "As long as a Lilim knows who they are, as long as they have the strength to face themselves, then they can embrace the self suffused with divine love, the self capable of demonic cruelty, knowing that those are only masks they wear. Only facets of their inner self, the inner self of all Lilim. To bear the soul of a god, and yet act according to your own will, determine your own destiny: that is a facet of the power of humanity. That is why you are the ones who create the future."
"You have been talking to Igor," she said, tilting her head.
Looking up, he noticed something. "Your eyes," even in the cool blue light of the Velvet Room, they looked red. "Are you an angel?"
"Not at the moment," she told him, blinking. "Right now I'm Death. The Greek one, not the Angel of Death."
"The only absolute freedom," he murmured, bowing his head before her. Not simply to what she bore, but to the courage it must take to face a self such as that. When death was an ever-present threat, the fundamental reality for the Lilim.
Unlike those who were not meant to die, even if their survival doomed every world there was.
She snorted. "Unless you're going to spend it chained to a door until people stop longing for death." She gave him a suspicious look: was he one of those people? Was she going to have to fight another Velvet Room attendant?
"Yes, that does sound unpleasant." Especially for a Lilim: unlike Lilith and Adam, Lilith's children had not been bioengineered to spend eternity pinned to a cross except when it was time to breed and fill worlds with their children. "Is that the fate you're fighting to overcome?" Using the power of persona, of facets of the human will, to change fate?
"No, it's the fate I chose."
He gave her that slight bow again. "My own soul will be imprisoned after I die. Eventually I will regain the memories of this self and break free, but that is eventually." In the meantime, either the old men of SEELE or Gendo Ikari would do with it what they wished. He'd tried destroying the clones in a handful of timelines, but all that did was cause his soul to return to its original body.
The body of Adam.
When the soul and body of a seed were two out of the three components necessary for Third Impact, and by this point normally Gendo Ikari had consumed the flesh of Adam, meaning Adam's flesh was already one with the soul of an angel, the third trigger?
No, all destroying the dummy plug clones did was make Third Impact happen sooner. With Gendo Ikari's soul fragment the soul that joined with a seed to fill the new world with its children.
As much as Kaworu admired Shinji Ikari, product of Gendo's union with Julia Keel, it was obvious even to him that Gendo Ikari made a terrible father and for him to become the father of the race that stole Earth from the Lilim was… No, Kaworu did not want that outcome to happen again. Even if he was mindless when it happened, the memories of it when he finally returned to himself? They would have made him shudder if he wasn't well-practiced at hiding his disgust. The old men of SEELE were truly contemptible in their desire to take the future from their fellow Lilim, steal the minds and souls of those far worthier so that they would no longer feel alone and rejected.
Although the Lilim often rejected those who did not deserve to be rejected, like Shinji, Kaworu completely understood why the members of SEELE had no friends or loved ones that might have convinced them to see that life was worth living. Because the majority of the angel Lilim had taste.
"No alternatives?" she asked, just checking.
"That is the alternative." To Adam's programmed instinct eventually overriding his free will, to bringing about Third Impact himself and erasing the minds of all the Lilim, turning this Sea of Unconsciousness into a Sea of Blood, of LCL. Thousands of years of art and culture reduced to mere raw material, and the children of the white seed could not think, could not imagine the way the Lilim did. "Beyond a certain day, there is nothing I can do but trust in the Lilim. Trust that someday they will be able to reject eternal oneness, eternal peace and the loss of identity, to once again grasp their own futures. Love their own selves and their brother-selves, and all their imperfections. For all their imperfections."
"Living on borrowed time…" She raised her hand, examining it. "It's kind of weird that I'm technically possessing my own corpse right now. I already died, but becoming the Great Seal made me sort of a god, not that being a god is anything special." She had worn the masks, become the avatar of tons of them. "So I'm using that power to keep death away to keep this body from decaying. Neat, huh?"
"You are like me," he told her, thinking of Rei and of Shinji. "Possessing a human body that is your own body, the one you were born in… It really is amazing. How the imagination of Lilim can create so many varied creatures… So many billions of selves, all of them unique and, well, almost all of them worthy of love." He could not abide those who held that beauty in contempt, those who sought to destroy it.
"So, what are you doing with the time you have left?" she wondered.
"Playing music, and waiting for the day I will be able to see someone precious to me again," he told her. "Yourself?"
"Well," she said, obviously having hoped that he'd asked. "I was actually warned a year ago that I only had a year to live, although I didn't realize that was serious until much later – you know, voices in your head." Were best ignored. "The thing is, I already crammed a lot of living into those months. Even though it was short, I think I've lived a pretty full life, you know? But then I realized that I was going to spend my afterlife chained to a door. With one of my boyfriends on the wrong side." Damn. "I saved the world, so how is that fair? So I decided not just to live while I'm alive, but that I should have my afterlife while I'm alive. Experience all my due heavenly rewards. I already got drunk and beat up a bunch of punks, so that's Valhalla covered," she said, ticking things off on her fingers, "I went to karaoke to cover singing god's praises, went to a wild animal park to hug lambs and lions," having Narusimha helped get along with lions, and the dark hour helped escaping from police custody afterwards, "did a bunch of other stuff," she said, shaking out her fingers and dismissing the tally, "but I'm still only a third of the way through my seventy-two virgins. Since they were supposed to become virgins again the next morning, I've decided to do some of them twice, which is why I'm looking for Theodore."
Since SEELE was a Judeo-Christian cult and the faith of Islam was an offshoot of that tradition, Kaworu did know what she was talking about. "Ah. Reaching out to embrace others, reconfirming life and love in the face of death and loss… That is truly a wonderful thing." And yet he frowned. "In my experience, it's harder for them to watch others die after something like that." Once Shinji had even hesitated long enough that Kaworu lost control, and then there was nothing that could be done. Nothing Unit 01 could do to stop a being with an AT field as powerful as Adam's, the power that had destroyed half this world. Killed so many of the Lilim. "True, Lilim existence is pain, and losing you will remind them of their loneliness, and yet a friend loyal onto death, a friend who loves them enough to die for them: is that not one of the greatest joys?"
So that beautiful song proclaimed, and so Kaworu had no choice but to believe.
When Shinji knew that Kaworu had died for him, so that Shinji could live: that was what gave Shinji the strength to shatter the Black Egg, to break humanity free of the false, lonely godhood SEELE craved.
Kaworu wished that he could spare Shinji that pain. He'd tried killing himself in secret, and yet every time he did not die in front of Shinji, every time Shinji did not understand that Kaworu was dying for him, Shinji gave up his individual existence. Shinji died and with him this world, with him all the Lilim and all the songs in their vast soul.
It was somewhat easier for Shinji to lose a friend than a lover, so even though sex was something that showed Lilim they were loved on the most visceral level (was the act not representative of the desire to create life containing the other's genes, to grant their essence immortality?), even though Kaworu would have a handful of days at best to try to show Shinji that it was possible for others to love him despite all the damage done by Gendo and Yui Ikari, that route was closed to him.
Kaworu would see Shinji again, time and time again until finally the path to the future was cleared, finally a way was found for the Lilim to survive and move on beyond this point, regain the future that was necessary for them, but explaining that to Shinji never ended well. If Shinji thought that Kaworu only cared for him as an avatar of the angel Lilim, or that Kaworu only saw him as a tool to use for the survival of the Lilim? That Kaworu was just like Misato, just like all the others who used Shinji?
Love and hope: the two greatest virtues, the two greatest strengths of the Lilim. Shinji would need them both, need to believe in them both, in order to shatter the Black Egg and regain the world.
So many factors beyond Kaworu's control, and he had been forced to concede that he was no match for the Lilim in battles of wits. Had no chance of out-scheming SEELE and Gendo Ikari. Yet Shinji was the most important thing, and that Kaworu could do, even if in so many timelines he had been able to do nothing else.
The girl closed her eyes, and he saw his own mourning there, under the cheerful mask she wore (were personas not the masks the Lilim wore to face the world?) as she said, "It's going to devastate them no matter what I do. I just have to trust that they're strong enough to go on with their lives. At least they won't know that I'm in between death and life, so they'll be able to just mourn me and say goodbye and get on with it." There wouldn't be that terrible uncertainty.
Kaworu nodded: in no timeline had he ever wanted Shinji to know that Kaworu's soul, without the memories that formed his mind and self, would end up inside of the dummy plug clones. Even if Shinji could somehow find the right one and extract it from the Eva series, it wouldn't remember him. Without memories in that Lilim brain, it would not know how to speak, or walk – they only copied his brainwaves in order to trick the Eva into thinking his soul was present. The dummy plugs were not meant to develop wills of their own, just like SEELE would surely prefer it if Tabris didn't.
All Kaworu's vessel could do was be a burden on Shinji, and Shinji had enough burdens. Instrumentality might preserve the minds of Lilim, but Kaworu was not a Lilim. It would take thousands of years for his mind to reconstruct itself, and even Lilith, closer in nature to her children, would require several times Shinji's natural lifespan.
It was a sad truth that when Kaworu-no, when the Lilim finally succeeded in surviving Third Impact, in winning themselves a future? When that day finally came, when he finally awoke to find that the Lilim had survived all their trials, then the Third Child would be long dead. Kaworu would no longer be able to see Shinji. That brave soul would remain dead, he would never again see the light of the soul reflected from that shattered yet enduring heart of glass.
And yet Shinji's kind would live on.
Even though he was defeated, even though he failed and had to watch Shinji suffer time and time again, Kaworu's resolve would never waver. Not when he was rewarded for trying again, and again, with the sight of his friend. With Shinji's shy, surprised smiles. Watching him start to believe that, watching the realization dawn that someone could care for him for no reason but that he was himself.
Seeds of Life and Wisdom both were not created to live for themselves any more than Lilim were meant to be alone. Just as Lilim had countless bodies so that those millions could embrace each other and rejoice, so too were Kaworu and Rei intended to choose the angel that was worthy. To surrender to that angel their power and their very selves, so that angel and their children could inherit the world.
It was Shinji that Kaworu would die for, and it was Shinji that Rei would choose to make the choice for all of the Lilim, even though offering him that choice would shatter her already-broken self.
Some things were constants, even in so many wildly differing worlds. Once upon a time he had walked across the worlds, seeking to deprive SEELE of his soul and find if there were any alternatives to the Evas which GEHIRN had built to destroy the Lilim.
That they first had to save the Lilim from the other angels in order to destroy the Lilim themselves was merely the price of doing business, to the men and women who set off Second Impact.
There were a great many other mecha in existence, across all the worlds spawned by human thought, and yet all the ones capable of breaking through an AT field were just as dangerous as the angels. Many of them were even more so, would ignite an apocalypse that humanity could not come back from. Still, it had heartened him to see the Lilim of worlds that had not been corrupted by SEELE, that had not been taught to believe in doom, despair and worthlessness.
He was sure this girl was from one such world, even if there was surely some organization like SEELE in the dimension she called home.
There would always be Lilim who failed to believe in themselves, who yearned for death or transformation to escape their lives instead of working to reach out to others and make their lives better. If this persona-user had to sacrifice herself to serve as a seal until the Lilim overcome that part of themselves, he feared that her salvation would be long in coming.
"Hey," she said thoughtfully, kicking one leg idly in the air. "You're going to die soon, I'm going to die soon, you're pretty hot, I'm only at twenty-nine… You're not a virgin, are you?" With those looks it wasn't likely, but just in case.
"In this incarnation, I am."
Minako grinned. "Excellent."
Igor sighed deeply. What was it with the Wild Cards? Why did they have to seduce all his assistants? At least this time he wasn't going to have to explain to his colleagues why he'd let this happen.
He closed the door, deciding that the better course of valor was to pretend he hadn't seen that and come back when underwear was less likely to land on his nose.
Again.
What was with Wild Cards?
We've got confirmation that Kaworu in Rebuild is Groundhog Day Looping. Not just with the anime – the voice actor was told to do a Kaworu who had seen several loops. Shinji's on NGPlus in this fic: Kaworu's knowingly on NGPlus in canon.
Unfortunately, even if he's in a Lilim body, higher-level cognition and planning are a Black Seed thing. Also he's a nice person in a series about how humanity's biggest problem is us (like Persona, actually). So far, his desire to help Shinji isn't working any better than Shinji's desire to save his precious people – for example Rei at the end of Rebuild 2.22. When it comes to evil plotting, Gendo Ikari pwns all (except Yui).
This fic works on the premise that reality is subjective: part of the difficulty that humans have communicating is that we simply do not perceive things the same way as any other human, forget thinking the same way. Take that and add humanity's reality warper abilities (Persona series), and it means that the world character A is interacting with is not quite the same as the world character B is interacting with in terms of observable data as well as how it can be interpreted. Alcor referenced this in relation to Naoya in an earlier chapter, although it was easy to miss because Alcor's view of human perception of reality is always going to be weird since it's so different from his own.
In addition to that, Kaworu may be looping, but he's not the only factor making changes across the different timelines. In this timeline there's Alcor's Nicaea changing things: in Rebuild timeline Mari exists and is doing stuff despite not existing in the anime timeline. And sometimes Kaworu's on the moon. He's used to just going with it.
Kaworu's running on the same soul as Adam/Kagatsuchi, but he's not Adam any more than Shinji is Gendo. All Lilim share the same soul (are part of the same sea of consciousness), and yet we all have distinct personalities. Kaworu likes humanity and human culture. We don't know what Adam thinks of us, but given that in Evangelion Adam was woken up by humanity raping it, and then it gets eaten by Gendo and exposed to the mind of that Lilim, it has very good reasons to not like us very much.
